I’ve been a business journalist for 25 years, for publications including Crain’s New York, BBC Capital, CNBC and others. I write for Stanford’s GSB, too, where I learn a lot about the entrepreneurial mind. In addition to writing about how startup ideology and technology advances are fueling an international age of entrepreneurship, I also write about how money drives this movement. What roles are angels, VCs and private equity playing, and how are governments and nonprofits hurting and helping? On the side, I have a personal business blog about freelancing at 200kfreelancer.com.

It Takes $14,000 and a Determined Entrepreneur To Seed Change in the Middle East

Yesterday, Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria were in the headlines again after they declared a caliphate under strict Islamic law. I couldn’t help but think of the contrast: on one hand, what looks to be a blanket of oppression settling over parts of both countries. On the other, I was standing next to the entrepreneur Ala’ Alsallal, 28, as he showed me piles of the banned books that his company, Jamalon, ships to readers throughout the Middle East.

Jamalon is a four-year-old online books retailer that carries 10 million titles, 75% of them in Arabic. Among them are the books on Alsallal’s new banned books list, which Alsallal started because he says it helps sales to ID the books being targeted by the government censors in countries where he operates.

“We keep facing trouble because of what we do,” he says. “But I feel happy when I get people to read or get books.”

Alsallal is one of the entrepreneurs I am meeting here this week, in Amman, Jordan, as I work on projects for a handful of business web sites interested in the stories outside of the violence in Iraq and Syria.

There are a lot of people and organizations pinning their hopes on entrepreneurs like Alsallal to create change in the Middle East. Yesterday, the San Francisco-based microfinance platform Kiva launched a $1 million program funded by Grameen-Jameel Microfinance Ltd. to funnel more money to entrepreneurs, especially young people and women. The program is offering up to 13,000 visitors a free trial to www.kiva.org/MiddleEast to lend to the entrepreneur of their choice. (Grameen is also giving matching grants). Why the focus on youth? One in four people under 30 in the Middle East don’t have a job, according to Kiva.

It doesn’t take much money to help a driven person start a company. Alsallal started Jamalon with $14,000 from Fadi Ghandour, the founder of logistics giant Aramex, whom he met through Ruwwad, a community center in Amman. Ruwwad helped fund Alsallal’s undergraduate degree.

Delivering books is Alsallal’s passion, though he also aspires to grow a company the size of MicrosoftMicrosoft. There is a Jorge Luis Borges quote hanging outside his door: ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,’ in offices that house 20 programmers, customer service representatives. Just around the corner are books which have arrived from dealers elsewhere in the Middle East and in Europe.

The company sells hundreds of thousands of books a year in a region that has long had a reputation as being a place where people don’t read much. Amazon doesn’t operate at all. In Amman, where Alsallal grew up in a Palestinian refugee community (his grandparents fled Palestine in 1948), there are only two libraries and bookstores are few and far between.

Jamalon has clearly found a market. The company’s revenues have been growing by two to three times a year and it is now adding another five to 10 employees, Alsallal says, though he won’t reveal how much the company makes, except to say it’s not yet profitable. After his seed funding from Ghandour, he raised about $1.2 million from Oasis500, a local incubator, and some prominent American investors, including Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups. He hopes to start raising a $5 million A-round later this year.

He started Jamalon with the help of his family (his parents are both teachers). When USAID gave Jamalon the commission to supply books for a library in a village in southern Jordan, Alsallal’s two brothers took the books in person by truck.

“When they arrived they found the whole village, all the people, waiting for them. They had cooked them a whole goat,” Alsallal said. “They were celebrating having a library.”

Alsallal laughs off the government censors. Among the banned books on his 10 million-strong list of available titles: Dan Brown’sDa Vinci Code (banned in Israel), and Hadith al-Junud (“Soldiers’ sayings”), a historical novel about the 1986 Yarouk University protests in Jordan (banned in Jordan). And, 50 Shades of Grey (banned everywhere from the United Arab Emirates to some places in the United States).

The Jordanian government used to stop his shipments at the airport, until Alsallal had a meeting with the King Abdullah. Invited with a group of tech entrepreneurs to share his concerns, Alsallal told the King the censors had tried to stop the king’s own book, “Our Last Best Chance.”

“He laughed, just like you are laughing,” Alsallal said. The overt problems have largely faded since the conversation with the King, though the publications arm of the government still sends strident letters. In other countries, meanwhile, the books disappear at the borders. Hugging a couple of books to his chest, he says, “You know what the censors told me? ‘We don’t want any books that can change the way people think.’ ”

That doesn’t matter, he says: “ We just keep sending them.”

And, by the way, Jamalon still ships to Syria and Iraq, with the help of Aramex.

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